You're leaving out a huge component of the difference between the two parties-- social issues. Same-sex marriage, abortion and the role of religion in public life (prayer in public schools, funding social programs run by churches with public money, etc.) are massively important issues for many voters.
Here's my understanding of how DMCA requests work:
Somebody sees something that they believe they hold the copyright on
Said somebody informs the company that provides the service on which the possibly infringing content has been found. In this notice, they have to assert that they own the copyright of the content.
The provider tells whoever put up the content that they've received a DMCA notice about it. If the user agrees that they don't hold the copyright or do nothing at all, the content gets taken down and we're done.
If the user claims that they do in fact hold the copyright to the material, the provider is supposed to inform whoever sent the DMCA notice of this. The content stays up and the provider has done their part. At this point, I think an actual lawsuit has to be filed to force the content to be taken down.
A provider is NOT required to take down material just because they receive a DMCA request. Their duty is to inform the potentially infringing party of a DMCA notice and take down the material if the potentially infringing party chooses not to disagree with the notice. The DMCA shields providers from legal action so long as they follow these notification rules.
What stops somebody from asking YouTube to take down all their videos by filing a bunch of bogus DMCA requests is that once the requests were forwarded to the users, the users would in many cases say "hey, that's my video and I own the rights" and YouTube wouldn't have to take anything down.
Now, YouTube almost certainly has a policy which allows them to take down any user's content at any time for any reason. They can take down material that they believe is copyrighted, regardless of what a potentially infringing user might say.
You have to wonder how much of an effect the trade embargo really has on this. The embargo is just for the US. Every other country in the world can trade with Cuba already. Most notably Taiwan and China both manufacture quite a lot of hardware and I'm sure would love to be able to export some there.
I remember hearing a factoid last year that said out of all US states, only Washington runs a trade *surplus* with China. It's probably true on the whole and not just with China, but this article was specifically talking about the President of China visiting the state. There's basically two big reasons for that trade surplus--both Microsoft and Boeing make most of their products here. People complain that we don't make anything in America anymore and don't export anything, but software is actually still one of the biggies.
There's some truth in what both of you have to say really. Being yourself and getting the girl are just not going to happen if your life mainly consists of sitting in your basement playing video games.
That said, searching for dates is really only good for finding one thing--dates. You may get laid or meet the girl of your dreams, but you're mostly going to spend money on dinners, drinks and movies for somebody's company for a few hours. If you just enjoy dating for the sake of dating (and many people do), all that is fine. A lot of the advice out there on the internet is targeted towards guys who want to date more and get laid more.
If you're looking for that serious, long term relationship though, well, you shouldn't actually be looking for it. People who are looking hard for relationships tend to be the last ones who should be in a relationship as they're often needy, insecure and desperate. The best relationships are the ones that you sort of stumble across while doing something else. Obviously, playing video games at home all day is unlikely to provide an environment where this can happen.
Beyond changing significant, alterable aspects of yourself (like not bathing or generally being disgusting), the key is not to stop being yourself, but rather to improve yourself such that other people can find you "being yourself" more interesting. One easy way to do that is to undertake some new hobbies or activities where there will be the kind of people you'd like to end up in a relationship with around. For some people, dating more (and making themselves more datable) is such a hobby. For others, it might be taking an art class or learning to ballroom dance or working on a politician's campaign.
Several years ago, I remember doing this in some C code I wrote. gcc handled it without any trouble, although I ended up having to unnest the functions when I had to port the code to the Visual C++ compiler. I'm not sure if gcc still supports it, but I'm pretty sure it's not part of any ANSI C standard.
Federal internet taxes are not the same thing as paying state sales tax on purchases made over the internet. Internet taxes would be taxes on either personal/business connections or services or other infrastructure, similar to the federal taxes that currently show up on cell phone, landline and cable bills already.
For starters, this is about state sales taxes, not federal income taxes. Lowering or raising federal income tax doesn't directly affect state tax revenues.
It gets even more interesting in states that don't have a personal income tax. I'm sure there's a way I'm supposed to pay WA state use tax on things I buy from out of state, but there's no easy way to do it since there's no state income tax and consequently no state income tax return. I'm sure there's some arcane form you're supposed to go out of your way to get from the state in order to declare the sale and pay the tax, but you've got to wonder who would ever do that and how you'd ever get caught for not doing it.
But can they really do that if Amazon has no business presence in New York? NY State Police can't raid Amazon's Seattle headquarters and the feds won't get involved because there's no federal law being violated. The same would seem to go for any lawsuit. Why would Amazon even have to listen to anything a NY court says? A federal court won't even get involved unless there's a dispute over federal law. If anything, the feds could step in to bitch slap New York for getting involved in interstate commerce--a power reserved for the feds.
I believe the only reason this is the case with alcohol is because there is federal law in place which gives states wide latitude on regulating alcohol. Moreover, PA could take whoever is doing the deliveries to court for breaking its laws on distribution of alcohol, but I'm not sure they could bust the sender so long as they weren't lying or trying to hide what was in the package.
Microsoft Corp. has announced that it is expanding its presence in Canada by opening a new software development centre in the Greater Vancouver Area, in British Columbia. The Microsoft Canada Development Centre will open in the fall of 2007 and will be home to software developers from around the world.
The Microsoft Canada Development Centre will operate as one of a handful of development centres outside the company's Redmond, Wash., headquarters. The other development centres are located in North Carolina, Ireland, Denmark and Israel. In addition, the company houses full research and development centres in the United Kingdom, India, China and the Silicon Valley. The Microsoft Canada Development Centre builds on recently announced expansions to Boston, Mass., and Bellevue, Washington. The Vancouver area is a global gateway with a diverse population and is close to Microsoftâ(TM)s corporate offices in Redmond and the Centre will also allow the company to continue to recruit and retain highly-skilled people affected by the immigration issues in the U.S.
Of course, once somebody has worked for a foreign subsidiary of a company for a while, they become eligible for visas that are less onerous to obtain than H1-B.
Courts have determined that when you buy something through the mail, the sale takes place at the seller's location not the buyer's location. Hence, when a NY resident buys something from Amazon, the sale takes place where Amazon is based--in WA. The exception is if the seller has a "substantial business presence" in the buyer's state, in which case the sale is considered to have taken place there.
It's not even a question of the seller not being obliged to collect the tax. In the example, NY has no authority to tax sales completed in WA.
To get around this, many states have so-called use taxes that are typically equal to their sales tax rates. Use tax is collected when a resident brings a good bought out of state back into their state of residence. The rationale is that the use of the item is being taxed, not the sale of the item. In practice, states only routinely collect use taxes on cars, because it's typically part of the process of registering and titling a car in a new state.
Personally, I can't see how NY is going to be able to enforce this law. They can't compel businesses outside of their jurisdiction to collect and remit these taxes without some sort of federal law.
Agreed. Especially if you're trying to get through downtown or across any sort of bridge (520, I-90, Montlake, ship canal, etc.) during rush hour, you're screwed. Crappy infrastructure plus water, water everywhere is a recipe for unavoidable congestion.
The map of states that charge sales tax already on digital downloads is interesting. I just assumed digital downloads were taxed everywhere. I've been paying sales tax on my iTunes downloads here in Washington state for as long as I can remember.
It really depends on the college and the high school. I worked hard in high school, but definitely found college more challenging. Most of what I learned in science, math and computer science type classes in college came from solving difficult problem sets or projects and not from listening to lectures or studying for exams.
My high school did not send most of its students to 4 year colleges
and certainly didn't prepare me as well for college as the high schools of many of the people I knew in college. By that same token though, I found the workload in grad school MUCH easier than the one I had in college while most of my friends in my cohort felt they'd never worked so hard in their academic lives. There's a wide variety of schools out there at all levels of education, which makes it hard to generalize too much.
Heh, funny running into a former student on here. There was a lot of work for the students, the TAs and me, the instructor, but it was definitely one my favorite jobs ever.
I've been around the block in academia before and after that class and Cal undergrads still impress me greatly. It's really amazing what they'll do when you push their limits. To kind of tie back to my original point, students taking the AP exam in CS just don't get that same intensity you got to experience first hand.
It can be brutal taking too much in summer school though. One summer, I took German 10 (German 1 and German 2 combined into a 10 week 10 unit course) while working as a TA for CS61B. That was a busy summer to say the least, but I learned a ton and never felt like a slacker at least.
Which is interesting because if Microsoft just wanted Yahoo to go away, the best thing they could probably do would be to drag this out as long as possible. Executive leadership would be distracted dealing with the proposed acquisition instead of focusing on their actual business, current employees would be planning their escape plan instead of being focused on their work and potential employees would steer clear of a company with such an uncertain future. Then, after dragging it out, Microsoft could just withdraw their offer and walk away from the table. Almost instantly, Yahoo's stock price would fall back to the mid to high teens it was valued at before the proposed acquisition was announced. Shareholder lawsuits would almost certainly ensue over the board not acting in shareholders' best interest. That would only hurt the morale of current and potential employees more while creating yet more distractions to the leadership.
High schools are all about selling students on this idea that taking AP exams will get them out of courses in college. It's true at most colleges, but not really the elite ones. I passed something like 9 AP exams in high school, which got me out of exactly 1 class at Berkeley. I only had to take one semester of writing instead of two. I could have skipped the first semester of calculus, but decided to retake it which looking back was probably a good thing. I graduated in the Letters and Science college ultimately (BA in CS), but I seem to vaguely recall that College of Engineering and College of Chemistry counted more AP classes. The main thing you get out of taking AP at Cal, is that you've already completed some units which can give you a slight registration preference after your first year. Also, it means you may be able to graduate early or just not worry as much about taking a full load every semester so that you can get to the 120 or so units required for graduation.
Overall, I don't believe AP classes are really equivalent to the college courses they replace at any substantial university, but they're a much better use of a student's time that whatever non-AP class they'd be taking in high school instead. Generally, they have the more motivated teachers and students, which means less time wasted in classes with behavior problem students and lame teachers. With so many kids coming into college needing to take so many remedial courses, AP has really just become the new college prep.
I've always viewed students getting credit for CS61B by the AP exam as a big loss though. There's just no way anybody who took AP CS in high school got the same rigor as CS61B at Cal. That said, I can see why students would rather bypass it and get on to advanced coursework more quickly. I taught that class as instructor of record in Summer 2004, so I admit I'm a bit biased.
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That's because the farm land is irrigated from reservoirs on the Columbia River.
You're leaving out a huge component of the difference between the two parties-- social issues. Same-sex marriage, abortion and the role of religion in public life (prayer in public schools, funding social programs run by churches with public money, etc.) are massively important issues for many voters.
Yes, but Congress pretty much always has horrible approval ratings. The President less so.
What Constitutional requirements doesn't he meet? He's old enough, was born here and has lived his entire life in the US, right?
Here's my understanding of how DMCA requests work:
A provider is NOT required to take down material just because they receive a DMCA request. Their duty is to inform the potentially infringing party of a DMCA notice and take down the material if the potentially infringing party chooses not to disagree with the notice. The DMCA shields providers from legal action so long as they follow these notification rules.
What stops somebody from asking YouTube to take down all their videos by filing a bunch of bogus DMCA requests is that once the requests were forwarded to the users, the users would in many cases say "hey, that's my video and I own the rights" and YouTube wouldn't have to take anything down.
Now, YouTube almost certainly has a policy which allows them to take down any user's content at any time for any reason. They can take down material that they believe is copyrighted, regardless of what a potentially infringing user might say.
Uh, Live Search is not the same thing as Windows Desktop Search.
You have to wonder how much of an effect the trade embargo really has on this. The embargo is just for the US. Every other country in the world can trade with Cuba already. Most notably Taiwan and China both manufacture quite a lot of hardware and I'm sure would love to be able to export some there.
I remember hearing a factoid last year that said out of all US states, only Washington runs a trade *surplus* with China. It's probably true on the whole and not just with China, but this article was specifically talking about the President of China visiting the state. There's basically two big reasons for that trade surplus--both Microsoft and Boeing make most of their products here. People complain that we don't make anything in America anymore and don't export anything, but software is actually still one of the biggies.
There's some truth in what both of you have to say really. Being yourself and getting the girl are just not going to happen if your life mainly consists of sitting in your basement playing video games.
That said, searching for dates is really only good for finding one thing--dates. You may get laid or meet the girl of your dreams, but you're mostly going to spend money on dinners, drinks and movies for somebody's company for a few hours. If you just enjoy dating for the sake of dating (and many people do), all that is fine. A lot of the advice out there on the internet is targeted towards guys who want to date more and get laid more.
If you're looking for that serious, long term relationship though, well, you shouldn't actually be looking for it. People who are looking hard for relationships tend to be the last ones who should be in a relationship as they're often needy, insecure and desperate. The best relationships are the ones that you sort of stumble across while doing something else. Obviously, playing video games at home all day is unlikely to provide an environment where this can happen.
Beyond changing significant, alterable aspects of yourself (like not bathing or generally being disgusting), the key is not to stop being yourself, but rather to improve yourself such that other people can find you "being yourself" more interesting. One easy way to do that is to undertake some new hobbies or activities where there will be the kind of people you'd like to end up in a relationship with around. For some people, dating more (and making themselves more datable) is such a hobby. For others, it might be taking an art class or learning to ballroom dance or working on a politician's campaign.
Several years ago, I remember doing this in some C code I wrote. gcc handled it without any trouble, although I ended up having to unnest the functions when I had to port the code to the Visual C++ compiler. I'm not sure if gcc still supports it, but I'm pretty sure it's not part of any ANSI C standard.
Because IBM apparently doesn't patent anything...
Federal internet taxes are not the same thing as paying state sales tax on purchases made over the internet. Internet taxes would be taxes on either personal/business connections or services or other infrastructure, similar to the federal taxes that currently show up on cell phone, landline and cable bills already.
For starters, this is about state sales taxes, not federal income taxes. Lowering or raising federal income tax doesn't directly affect state tax revenues.
It gets even more interesting in states that don't have a personal income tax. I'm sure there's a way I'm supposed to pay WA state use tax on things I buy from out of state, but there's no easy way to do it since there's no state income tax and consequently no state income tax return. I'm sure there's some arcane form you're supposed to go out of your way to get from the state in order to declare the sale and pay the tax, but you've got to wonder who would ever do that and how you'd ever get caught for not doing it.
But can they really do that if Amazon has no business presence in New York? NY State Police can't raid Amazon's Seattle headquarters and the feds won't get involved because there's no federal law being violated. The same would seem to go for any lawsuit. Why would Amazon even have to listen to anything a NY court says? A federal court won't even get involved unless there's a dispute over federal law. If anything, the feds could step in to bitch slap New York for getting involved in interstate commerce--a power reserved for the feds.
I believe the only reason this is the case with alcohol is because there is federal law in place which gives states wide latitude on regulating alcohol. Moreover, PA could take whoever is doing the deliveries to court for breaking its laws on distribution of alcohol, but I'm not sure they could bust the sender so long as they weren't lying or trying to hide what was in the package.
Microsoft Corp. has announced that it is expanding its presence in Canada by opening a new software development centre in the Greater Vancouver Area, in British Columbia. The Microsoft Canada Development Centre will open in the fall of 2007 and will be home to software developers from around the world.
The Microsoft Canada Development Centre will operate as one of a handful of development centres outside the company's Redmond, Wash., headquarters. The other development centres are located in North Carolina, Ireland, Denmark and Israel. In addition, the company houses full research and development centres in the United Kingdom, India, China and the Silicon Valley. The Microsoft Canada Development Centre builds on recently announced expansions to Boston, Mass., and Bellevue, Washington. The Vancouver area is a global gateway with a diverse population and is close to Microsoftâ(TM)s corporate offices in Redmond and the Centre will also allow the company to continue to recruit and retain highly-skilled people affected by the immigration issues in the U.S.
Of course, once somebody has worked for a foreign subsidiary of a company for a while, they become eligible for visas that are less onerous to obtain than H1-B.Courts have determined that when you buy something through the mail, the sale takes place at the seller's location not the buyer's location. Hence, when a NY resident buys something from Amazon, the sale takes place where Amazon is based--in WA. The exception is if the seller has a "substantial business presence" in the buyer's state, in which case the sale is considered to have taken place there.
It's not even a question of the seller not being obliged to collect the tax. In the example, NY has no authority to tax sales completed in WA.
To get around this, many states have so-called use taxes that are typically equal to their sales tax rates. Use tax is collected when a resident brings a good bought out of state back into their state of residence. The rationale is that the use of the item is being taxed, not the sale of the item. In practice, states only routinely collect use taxes on cars, because it's typically part of the process of registering and titling a car in a new state.
Personally, I can't see how NY is going to be able to enforce this law. They can't compel businesses outside of their jurisdiction to collect and remit these taxes without some sort of federal law.Agreed. Especially if you're trying to get through downtown or across any sort of bridge (520, I-90, Montlake, ship canal, etc.) during rush hour, you're screwed. Crappy infrastructure plus water, water everywhere is a recipe for unavoidable congestion.
Oh, about the time a Euro started being worth more than about $1.25 or so.
The map of states that charge sales tax already on digital downloads is interesting. I just assumed digital downloads were taxed everywhere. I've been paying sales tax on my iTunes downloads here in Washington state for as long as I can remember.
It really depends on the college and the high school. I worked hard in high school, but definitely found college more challenging. Most of what I learned in science, math and computer science type classes in college came from solving difficult problem sets or projects and not from listening to lectures or studying for exams.
My high school did not send most of its students to 4 year colleges and certainly didn't prepare me as well for college as the high schools of many of the people I knew in college. By that same token though, I found the workload in grad school MUCH easier than the one I had in college while most of my friends in my cohort felt they'd never worked so hard in their academic lives. There's a wide variety of schools out there at all levels of education, which makes it hard to generalize too much.
Heh, funny running into a former student on here. There was a lot of work for the students, the TAs and me, the instructor, but it was definitely one my favorite jobs ever.
I've been around the block in academia before and after that class and Cal undergrads still impress me greatly. It's really amazing what they'll do when you push their limits. To kind of tie back to my original point, students taking the AP exam in CS just don't get that same intensity you got to experience first hand.
It can be brutal taking too much in summer school though. One summer, I took German 10 (German 1 and German 2 combined into a 10 week 10 unit course) while working as a TA for CS61B. That was a busy summer to say the least, but I learned a ton and never felt like a slacker at least.
Which is interesting because if Microsoft just wanted Yahoo to go away, the best thing they could probably do would be to drag this out as long as possible. Executive leadership would be distracted dealing with the proposed acquisition instead of focusing on their actual business, current employees would be planning their escape plan instead of being focused on their work and potential employees would steer clear of a company with such an uncertain future. Then, after dragging it out, Microsoft could just withdraw their offer and walk away from the table. Almost instantly, Yahoo's stock price would fall back to the mid to high teens it was valued at before the proposed acquisition was announced. Shareholder lawsuits would almost certainly ensue over the board not acting in shareholders' best interest. That would only hurt the morale of current and potential employees more while creating yet more distractions to the leadership.
High schools are all about selling students on this idea that taking AP exams will get them out of courses in college. It's true at most colleges, but not really the elite ones. I passed something like 9 AP exams in high school, which got me out of exactly 1 class at Berkeley. I only had to take one semester of writing instead of two. I could have skipped the first semester of calculus, but decided to retake it which looking back was probably a good thing. I graduated in the Letters and Science college ultimately (BA in CS), but I seem to vaguely recall that College of Engineering and College of Chemistry counted more AP classes. The main thing you get out of taking AP at Cal, is that you've already completed some units which can give you a slight registration preference after your first year. Also, it means you may be able to graduate early or just not worry as much about taking a full load every semester so that you can get to the 120 or so units required for graduation.
Overall, I don't believe AP classes are really equivalent to the college courses they replace at any substantial university, but they're a much better use of a student's time that whatever non-AP class they'd be taking in high school instead. Generally, they have the more motivated teachers and students, which means less time wasted in classes with behavior problem students and lame teachers. With so many kids coming into college needing to take so many remedial courses, AP has really just become the new college prep.
I've always viewed students getting credit for CS61B by the AP exam as a big loss though. There's just no way anybody who took AP CS in high school got the same rigor as CS61B at Cal. That said, I can see why students would rather bypass it and get on to advanced coursework more quickly. I taught that class as instructor of record in Summer 2004, so I admit I'm a bit biased.